The present application is concerned with tracking the position of a bearer of a mobile device.
A multitude of positioning systems are currently known. The most common systems are based on satellite based methods, which however necessitate the availability of satellite RF signals. For this reason, the latter systems are of no use inside of buildings, or at least of restricted use only.
Positioning systems dedicated for use inside of buildings often rely on received signal strength measurements of RF signals such as GSM, WiFi, Bluetooth or the like. Sometimes, the cellular structure of such an arrangement of transmitting nodes in a network is used for a coarse localization. However, using the just mentioned kind of positioning systems necessitates that investments be made, and these investments are often too high compared to their benefit with respect to inside localization. Furthermore, these systems are relatively imprecise and often do not enable differentiating between positions in front of and behind a certain obstacle, such as a wall, a door, a barrier or the like.
Other positioning systems for interior zones use beacons based on infrared, RF, and/or magnetism, placed at predetermined positions and rendering, by way of their limited reach of their output signals, individual locations, i.e. their surroundings, distinguishable and identifiable. However, position determination is feasible merely at those locations where the output signal of the beacon may be received, i.e. in the surroundings of the beacon, the size of which is determined by the beacon's reach.
A further method of determining the position in interior rooms uses sensors which detect the movement of a body, such as of a human or some other object so that the position thereof may be determined relative to some reference location. However, with increasing distance from the reference locations, the position determined becomes increasingly unreliable, as with increasing time and distance from the reference locations, the numbers of detected movements increases, which in turn causes that drifts negatively affect the position determined. In effect, the position inaccuracy becomes so high, that the latter positioning systems are useless for most application sceneries.
Accordingly, it would be favorable to have a concept at hand which allows tracking a position of a bearer of a mobile device independent from the environmental conditions more efficiently, such as with necessitating less efforts, costs and so forth and/or at increased accuracy.